Andras Mezei

TESTIMONY:
 

Voices of the Holocaust
Translated from the Hungarian and introduced by Thomas Land

Auschwitz is a museum. The smoke has now dispersed, and each generation to the end of history must make peace with the past and resolve to live with its ability to attempt genocide.
Andras Mezei, who has just died in his native Budapest aged 78 years, has left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. His voices of the past address us with urgency and directness unheard within museum walls. There are many voices of the Holocaust speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity. They could be incomprehensible; Mezei's poetry makes them sound like our own voice.
Mezei is a major Jewish-Hungarian poet. He survived the Nazi attempt at the "ethnic cleansing" of Europe as a child in the Budapest Ghetto where some 17,000 souls perished around him from hunger, disease and the fancy of uniformed bandits.
Unlike other great poets of the Holocaust like Paul Celan, Primo Levi and Miklos Radnoti, Mezei declines to come to terms with death — indeed, his work is a celebration of the unconquerable spirit of his people. And unlike Anne Frank, he had the luxury of time to give voice to the concerns of the victims at the height of his literary powers.

 

NIGHTMARES: THE SURVIVOR

How many nights must come before
I need not wake up anymore?


BLUE EYES

They who ravished the robust women
among my forbears, they our tormentors
still live within me to this day
with the spilled blood of our menfolk.

So many Franks and Slavs and Mongols,
brave blades of the pogroms, lurk in my bones
yet, by the right of the mothers, the Jew
stares back at them from my face.

They've changed my brown eyes into blue,
and made my curly dark hair blond,
that rabble of all Teutonic Europe
who gather and bustle and stir in my cells,

they who have dressed my bones in their skin,
their white skin soft like fancy linen —
But as the rabbis have blessed the fate
of the Jewish people in the offspring,

and brought them up, despite the rapes,
from age to age as Jewish children,
still the murderers have blue eyes
and blue eyed also are the victims.


DEPORTATION

The people they've lived with in the village
are being herded in front of closed portals,
still and silent each. The fences
would conceal all sight, all feelings,
except for the tea-rose, the violet and weed
leaping through to reach out towards them.


A CHOICE

When the children were torn from their mothers,
and the ghetto was searched for tiny creatures
left in hiding, and the cries and the screams
were drowned by loudspeakers blaring out lullabies,
and the children were crammed into lorries, a German
soldier turned to one pleading mother,
How many children have you?
and she replied, I have three —
then he said, You may take back one of them
and helped her on board the vehicle
to choose one, as three pairs of eyes lit up
and three pairs of arms expectantly opened
towards her: Mother, take me, me, me!
An eyewitness recalls that she
declined the choice. She left alone.
How many children have you?
She informs God, I have three!


HIS OWN COMMAND

He prescribed a frostbite ointment
for the sore foot of the guardsman.
And he still explained on the way
which chemist could supply it that day
under the rules of the early siege
of Budapest, as the soldier limped
along with him towards the place
of execution. The Jewish doctor
obeyed his own command.


TESTIMONY

The people stripped off their garments.
They did not weep. They did not shout.
They did not beg for mercy.
A grey-haired woman standing by
the freshly dug hole in the ground
cuddled a baby in her arms — she
sang for it, tickled it, and the child
rejoiced in rings of laughter.
 

MY FOLK

Those tottering figures who wandered away
from the lengthy disintegrating
marching columns of the deported,
who left the highways
and took to the fields
soaked by the icy November showers
in flapping rags like windblown scarecrows,
those were my people, such easy targets
for the guard, folk hunted like rabbits,
yet who still attempted to beg,
yet who still were shot down while trying —
I remember them
every morning
when I take on the day and the dross
has not yet gathered in my heart.


FLAMES

The ones who gave up their personal cyanide tablets
to spare a child from agony in the gas ~
themselves have kindled the burning bush,

the ones who approached the end with dignity
herded to cruel death but not like cattle —
themselves have kindled the burning bush,

the ones who were able to dig their graves and toss
hell behind themselves with the clumps of earth —
themselves have kindled the burning bush.


VOICES

Suddenly I speak in my mother's voice.
Suddenly I speak in my father's voice.
Suddenly I hear my people speak
in my voice.


A CHORUS OF PIOUS SOULS

A dreadful silence, even at Yom Kippur.
My Lord, there must have been a weighty reason.
The horror of the graves in mute fruition ~
My Lord, there must have been a weighty reason
that no relief came in our desperation,
my Lord, there must have been a weighty reason:
instead, the gendarme came to us, death and oppression,
my Lord, there must have been a weighty reason,
the hell of Nagyvarad Ghetto, persecution -
My Lord, there must have been a weighty reason:
our words took wings, our souls soared in devotion,
my Lord, there must have been a weighty reason
that He who had given the Torah showed no compassion
my Lord — there must have been a weighty reason.


THE STREET OF THE DEAD

I walk along that street as though
nothing had occurred there,
I recall each face as though
the residents were still present,
I name the name of every soul,
from house to house I walk and call
my brothers who still live there,
together, beyond the present.


IN THEIR PLACE: A DAUGHTER

My daddy's lost children: Eve and little Joe.
My mummy's lost children: Stevie and little Paul.
My daddy's marriage, a legendary love match.
But mummy mourned at every river ~ I know
she wished to die.

My daddy declared: his parents' graves lay here.
And mummy declared that people should not forsake
their parents' final resting place.
And thus they merged their equal losses, although
at first it was only
beneath the canopy
for the law took its time to confirm
the death of mummy's husband and daddy's wife.

Mummy wanted no children
after Stevie and little Paul;
but after Eve and little Joe,
my daddy yearned for babies more and more.

That is why I am here. I was named
after daddy's late daughter. I live in their place.
My mourning father was 54 years of age
and my mother was 42
when I was born.
 

THE 20179TH

Like ink on the blotting paper, the number
tattooed in Auschwitz splinters and spreads
on the inside of my lower left arm
when I ride the tram in the summer
and, forgetting myself, I happen
to reach up in my short sleeved-shirt
to hang on to the strap.

  *     *     *     *
May I never lift my right arm
if I forget the mark on my left.
 

ANDRAS MEZEI (1930-2008): poet, novelist and editor, a major chronicler of the Holocaust. Unusually for a Hungarian poet, his work won early recognition in several European languages as well as Hebrew. He was a literary journalist most of his life. After the collapse of Communist administration, he founded Budapest City Press and the literary-political journal CET that forged a leading role in the debate and reconstruction of Eastern Europe. He published a substantial volume of collected poetry shortly before his death. He is survived by the poet Judit Toth, his companion over the past 15 years, their daughter Anna, and his son Gabor from his late wife Magda Szekely, another noted Holocaust poet.

THOMAS ORSZAG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent based in Budapest
Some of his poems are reproduced in the Annexe under Thomas Land

Andras Mezei: Many-sided poet and editor
Obituary from The Independent Friday, 27 June 2008

András Mezei was a many-sided and accomplished Hungarian writer and poet. One of the defining experiences of his life was the period of Nazi terror in German-occupied Hungary during 1944. His father perished in Auschwitz and although Mezei himself survived, the suffering he and hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews underwent left an emotional scar on him for life.
This was evident from the short but poignant poem "Szelektáláson" ("Selection", 1993) in which he speaks in the voice of an Auschwitz survivor:
 

With his gloved hand Mengele
touched my shoulder. Separating us. My mother
died there, and since then I have been dragging
my left shoulder as if it belonged to another body
in this world, the God of which I do not know.
 

After the war, Mezei trained as a locksmith and a lathe operator before leaving for the newly established state of Israel in 1949. After a year and a half in Israel, he returned to Communist Hungary, where for some years he worked as an engineering technician. After the suppression of the 1956 revolution he was considered reliable enough to be given a job in the thoroughly purged press department of the Ministry of Education. His poetic début took place at about the same time, in the notoriously unrepresentative verse anthology Tuztánc (Fire Dance, 1958), in which, instead of poetic talent, political reliability was the measure.

This, however, gave a boost to Mezei's career, for from 1958 until 1992 he was a frequent contributor to and a member of the editorial board of the weekly Élet és irodalom. During this period he studied Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest.
Though in the initial years of the Kádár regime Mezei unquestioningly accepted the policies of the Communist dictatorship, with time his views underwent a change, and his interest in Jewish culture re-emerged. He was no longer able to deny that the 1956 revolution had succeeded in some measure, by achieving more freedom and better living conditions for Hungarians. And as a result he wrote the script of Szerencsés Dániel ("Lucky Daniel", 1983), one of the first Hungarian films to address the issue of the Communist régime's lying clichés about the uprising.

Also during the 1980s he began to explore the contradictions of "Socialist" society and wrote a number of polemical pieces which were collected in Ilyen gazdagok vagyunk? ("Are We that Rich?", 1981) and in Ki beszél itt már Mexikóról? ("And Who Still Talks Here about Mexico?", 1986). An interesting collection of his essays, mostly on the Jewish-Hungarian dialogue, was Kettos kötodés ("Dual Belonging", 2003).

From his first collection Torlódó ido ("Piled-up Time", 1961) onwards András Mezei kept returning to Jewish themes. Some of these relate to his immediate family and some to Old Testament figures, while others are inspired by two famous sculptures by Michelangelo, Moses and David. These poems are more convincing than Mezei's efforts at creating grand "revolutionary" syntheses in the manner of his poem "De profundis . . ."
His poetry, first influenced by the poets of the Ujhold ("New Moon") generation, gained strength by absorbing surrealistic techniques which are already apparent in the poetic selection Fehér malom ("White Mill", 1978). It was, however, only after the change of régime that Mezei was able fully to return to his favourite subject, first with Zsidó versek ("Jewish Poems", 1990), then with Adorno (1993). The latter collection, some of its pieces translated into English by Thomas Land, was a poetic collage of eye-witness accounts of the Nazi persecution of Jews, both in Hungary and elsewhere. It is partly based on the works of Hanna Krall and Marek Edelman, but also contains poems which signal acceptance of the poet's dual identity: "I did not ask God/ to be born a Jew – so I have no/ chance to choose" ("They Chose Me"). In 2007 a large collection of Mezei's verse was published in Budapest, entitled Hármaskönyv ("A Triple Book").

In 1992 Mezei launched the publishing house Belvárosi Könyvkiadó (City Publishing House) and a year later the cultural periodical C.E.T. ("Central European Times"). As president of the Hungarian-Israeli Friendship Society from 1989 onwards, Mezei was invited to Israel several times and he also visited England on one occasion. Amongst his literary awards, the Israeli Kotzetnik Prize (1986) and the Hungarian János Arany Prize (1997) were the highest.

A novel set in the Budapest of 1943-44, A csodatévo, was published as The Miracle Worker in Thomas Kabdebo's English translation in 1999. Mezei's poems in the anthology In Quest of the Miracle Stag, Vol II (2003) were translated into English by Peter Zollman and Thomas Land.

George Gömöri